Why black history is everyone’s history…

In honour of Black History Month, I shall be releasing a three-part series of articles on a topic that is important for everyone to understand. Black History Month is an important month that not only highlights black history, but also the history of the entire world. As I have written in my previous articles, race and ethnicity have very little to do with scientific evidence, but rather terminology and ideas fabricated by people. Over many years, people – mainly scientists and political figures – have found ways to socially divide people based on very little or no scientific evidence. Today, we divide ourselves up into all kinds of racial and ethnic groups. I have never liked using the words ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’. If we all come from one man and one woman – and, therefore, from one race and one ethnicity – at what point did we start defining races and ethnicities based on physical appearance?

In my article ‘The human race: One body many parts’, I explain how the origin of the word ‘race’ does not come from scientific roots; it came from eighteenth-century American and European pro-slavery institutions, allowing them to class black people as a different species altogether, dehumanising them in order to legally trade them as slaves (Audrey Smedly, Race in North America: A Worldview). Let me also introduce you to a scientist and doctor by the name of Samuel Morton, who is known as the scientist of racism. Morton believed that people could be divided up into five separates races, representing five different acts of creation. No matter if you are a believer, atheist, Buddhist, naturalist, evolutionist or scientist, I think we can all agree that this is a completely invalid argument – and it has been proven invalid by modern scientific research. What’s more, Morton went on to try to prove his theory by studying the shape of people’s skulls and labelling the skulls accordingly as Caucasian, Mongolian and Ethiopian. Morton then claimed that Caucasians were the most intelligent, followed by Mongolians and, at the bottom of that list, Ethiopians (or ‘blacks’). Racial distinctions, including ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘American Indian’, ‘Asian Indian’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Japanese’ and ‘Samoan’, were even written into the Jim Crow laws and are now found in statutes like the Civil Rights Act. Again, no ethnic group recorded in these laws and constitutions was labelled by scientific fact, but rather human opinion.

Unfortunately, this language has now become so commonly used that it is hard to reverse. It has made its way into politics, schools, debates and even how we talk about one another. According to an article in the National Geographic’s race issue, Morton’s research only revealed two genuine truths. One: that we are all related. And two: that all our ancestors are African – one race, one ethnicity. When we look at the scientific research of genetics, all that has happened over many generations is that our genetic sequencing has mutated ever so slightly according to the environment in which we live. We all migrated out of Africa – to the Far East, into Europe, across to Malaysia, overseas to Australasia, North America and eventually South America. For some of us, skin pigmentation has slowly faded to a lighter colour because, in colder parts of the world, we did not use it or need it as much. In the same way your brain forgets maths equations you learnt in secondary school because you have not needed to use them, so, too, can we develop less or more pigmentation in our skin colour according to how much we need it. Simply put, if your body is not using it, it will eventually lose it. Therefore, I do not like using words that refer to our ethnic separation, as, firstly, it is not scientifically correct and, secondly, it inaccurately highlights the differences between us, as opposed to our very real similarities.

God tells us in Genesis how He created the first man and woman, from which came all future generations. God said to Abraham, ‘I will cause your descendants to become as numerous as the starts of the sky … and through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed.’ (Genesis 26:4) How could God divide what was, in His eyes, always one family? The children you have will also go on to have more descendants. When you look at your third, fourth and fifth generations, you consider them to be part of your family line, your distant relatives. In addition, you also came from a line of descendants, which means that everyone’s family traces back to the same starting point. Somewhere, way down my ancestral line, my family crossed with your lineage! This also means that your family crosses with the lineage of your black colleague at work, your Chinese neighbours, your Italian hairdresser, the homeless guy on the street, the criminal convicted of murder and the prostitute addicted to drugs. It does not matter how rich or poor you are – whether you are white or black, Christian or Jewish – we are all essentially part of the same family tree and all our ancestors originated from Africa.

Watch out for part two of ‘Related from Genesis’ next week.

Author: Laura McBride Galarza

Editor: Melissa Bond